I think React won partly because one of the most important tools for Facebook's revenue, the "Power Editor", was built on react (before react even existed, I suppose)
As one of the first Facebook PMDs (later FMPs) part of my job back then (around 2010-2012) was to keep up to date with changes in the ads API, but our main contacts were two guys in Ireland and themselves not always kept up to date with every development out of Palo Alto – I realised that the Power Editor was a client-side app, so I would reverse engineer it to find new features that were being run as internal experiments and stay up to date.
I realised that they had broken up the app into classes that kept their own state, using a framework that they called Bolt/Javelin – which would later become React – so I ended up writing what was probably one of the first browser extensions to debug "React" :)
Their ads team grew and grew and suddenly the two blokes in Ireland became hundreds and thousands. I can't imagine a better POC for a technology than the power editor was, because of how much of an impact it had for Facebook's ads business exponential growth.
As one of the first Facebook PMDs (later FMPs) part of my job back then (around 2010-2012) was to keep up to date with changes in the ads API, but our main contacts were two guys in Ireland and themselves not always kept up to date with every development out of Palo Alto – I realised that the Power Editor was a client-side app, so I would reverse engineer it to find new features that were being run as internal experiments and stay up to date.
I realised that they had broken up the app into classes that kept their own state, using a framework that they called Bolt/Javelin – which would later become React – so I ended up writing what was probably one of the first browser extensions to debug "React" :)
Their ads team grew and grew and suddenly the two blokes in Ireland became hundreds and thousands. I can't imagine a better POC for a technology than the power editor was, because of how much of an impact it had for Facebook's ads business exponential growth.